{"id":11263,"date":"2011-11-19T03:11:41","date_gmt":"2011-11-19T03:11:41","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-11-19T03:11:41","modified_gmt":"2011-11-19T03:11:41","slug":"After-a-Horrific-Crash-a-Stark-Depiction-of-Injustice-in-China","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?p=11263","title":{"rendered":"After a Horrific Crash, a Stark Depiction of Injustice in China"},"content":{"rendered":"

Days after a nine-seat van crammed with 62 kindergartners slammed into a coal truck in northwest China this week, killing 21 children and two adults, the 21st Century Business Herald \u2014 a state-run, reliably nationalistic newspaper \u2014 did something extraordinary. The nine-seat van was carrying 62 children; 21 were killed and the rest were injured, setting off angry discussions about safety standards and corruption. It published a chart.<\/strong> <\/p>\n

In one column, the paper recounted recent school-bus accidents in which about 60 children had died. In an adjacent column, it listed the sums that selected Chinese government departments had lavished on new cars in 2010. No Chinese citizen needed a pencil to connect the dots. Since the accident on Wednesday in Gansu Province, China\u2019s Twitter-like microblogs and other social media sites have been alight with heartbreak and outrage over the tragedy \u2014 and they have been subsequently red-carded by government censors for unpatriotic emotion. But there are few more devastating statements about what gnaws at modern Chinese than the state-run newspaper\u2019s two columns of numbers. <\/p>\n

As China sped toward its new status as the world\u2019s second largest economy, the already yawning gap between the rich and poor grew wider. By sociologists\u2019 calculations, income inequality here is not that far from levels that have spurred social unrest in other nations. But some things are not easily reduced to statistics. There is an argument, buttressed by the Gansu tragedy, that what truly eats at people here is not so much the rich-poor gap as the canyon that separates the powerful from the powerless. \u201cMost Chinese aren\u2019t angry about rising inequality,\u201d said Martin K. Whyte, a Harvard sociologist who specializes in research on Chinese social trends. \u201cIt\u2019s not rich versus poor. It\u2019s the system of power and procedural injustices that they\u2019re upset about.\u201d And in fact, many episodes in the litany of scandal and misfortune that has consumed Chinese Web surfers in recent years had little to do with money.<\/strong> <\/p>\n

SOURCE<\/a>
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